Canada Needs a Small Business Investment Strategy, Globe and Mail Argues

Canada lacks a dedicated investment strategy for its small business sector, and The Globe and Mail says the gap demands a policy answer.

The national newspaper made the case in a recent opinion piece, arguing that Ottawa has no coherent framework for directing capital toward small enterprises. The argument lands at a moment when Canadian policy debate is dominated by large-scale industrial spending — subsidies for electric vehicle plants, battery manufacturing and critical minerals — while the country's smaller firms compete for a shrinking pool of private capital.

The Globe and Mail's core claim is straightforward: small businesses form the backbone of the Canadian economy, yet the policy apparatus treats them as an afterthought. Federal and provincial programs exist in fragments — grants, tax credits, lending programs administered through the Business Development Bank of Canada and regional development agencies — but no single strategy connects them into a system that moves investment to firms with growth potential.

That absence has consequences. Small and medium-sized enterprises account for the overwhelming majority of employer firms in Canada and employ the bulk of the private-sector workforce. When capital fails to reach them, the economy pays through slower productivity growth, weaker expansion and fewer high-quality jobs outside major urban centers.

The newspaper's argument also touches on scale. Canadian pension funds and institutional investors manage trillions of dollars in assets, but they deploy that capital overwhelmingly in large deals, foreign markets and infrastructure. Small Canadian businesses sit below the size threshold where institutional money operates. Without structured vehicles — funds of funds, co-investment platforms, pooled vehicles designed to aggregate smaller opportunities — that mismatch persists.

The productivity dimension sharpens the case. Canada has recorded weak productivity growth for years, and economists across the political spectrum have flagged business investment as a chronic shortcoming. The Globe and Mail's argument reframes that debate: the problem is not only how much capital Canada deploys, but where it lands. A national strategy aimed at small business would push capital toward the firms most likely to convert it into hiring, innovation and expansion.

The opinion piece arrives as the federal government faces pressure on several economic fronts — housing affordability, inflation-wary consumers and an uncertain trade relationship with the United States. Against that backdrop, a small business investment strategy offers a policy lever that does not require new trade negotiations or constitutional maneuvering. It requires coordination: aligning tax treatment, lending mandates and institutional investment rules around a single objective.

Critics of previous Canadian industrial policy efforts have pointed to a pattern of scattered, short-lived programs that expire before firms can build around them. A strategy, as distinct from a program, implies permanence and coherence — a framework durable enough that entrepreneurs, lenders and investors can plan against it.

The Globe and Mail does not spell out a full legislative blueprint, but the direction of its argument is clear. Canada should treat small business capital formation as a matter of national economic strategy, not as a residual category of regional development spending.

Whether Ottawa takes up that framing is the open question. The paper's editorial voice carries weight in Canadian policy circles, and its argument gives the government — and the opposition — a template for turning a fragmented set of supports into a system built to move money to the firms that employ most Canadians.